TOPkit Part II: Leveraging Open Educational Resources in Your Custom Faculty Development Program

In support of the State University System of Florida Board of Governors 2025 Strategic Plan for Online Education, a team of instructional designers at the University of Central Florida produced two sample courses that could easily be adopted by other institutions for their own faculty development. One course is structured as a 10-week facilitated course, and the “lite” version is modified as a 5-week fully online course that may be self-paced or facilitated. The two sample online faculty development courses based on UCF’s award winning IDL6543 are downloadable as an IMS common cartridge that can be imported into an LMS and customized to meet the needs of individual institutions. These courses are a distillation of the key elements of IDL6543 that institutions may use—as is, or modified—to train their own faculty. The content is of the same high quality that UCF has used to train its own faculty. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following: Accessibility & Universal Design for Learning; Open Educational Resources; Interaction, Collaboration & Group Work Strategies; Online Assessments & Assessment Tools; Managing Academic Integrity & Honesty in the Online Environment; LMS Training; Campus Resources; Web Vet Strategies; Online Teaching Persona; FERPA & Copyright; Library Services; Bloom’s Taxonomy & Course Objectives; Group, Collaboration, and Conferencing Tools; Online Classroom Dynamics; Content Delivery and Logistics, and Emerging Technology. This session is intended for anyone interested in driving excellence by building a faculty development course from the ground up or significantly updating their existing professional development offering. We will provide a tour of the two sample courses, discuss the differences, and offer next steps to take advantage of these open resources